November 2024
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14 Reads
This chapter draws from the terms and methods of Writing Across the Curriculum to theorize four centuries of interdisciplinary scholarly engagement with Shakespeare. Sometimes scholars obnoxiously cite Shakespeare’s quotable quotes out of context, but there’s also a more compelling history to be told of Shakespeare both receiving and generating new knowledge in fields outside literary studies. This story is framed by the development of academic disciplinarity from the classical age to Shakespeare’s day as well as the modernization of the disciplines leading up to our time. Key readings range from Shakespeare’s own depiction of academic disciplinarity in The Taming of the Shrew, early political appropriations like John Milton’s Eikonoklastes, and the rise of historicism with Charlotte Lennox in the eighteenth century, to nineteenth-century entomologists, twentieth-century psychologists, and twenty-first-century computer scientists. Emphasis is placed on the rise of “studies” disciplines—such as women’s studies, disability studies, and post-colonial studies—plus the prospects of interdisciplinary collaboration, positional knowledge, and public writing outside academia.